The New Normal

I’ll talk a big talk, but when the time comes I tend to stick to what I know. Hence my living in my hometown three years after graduating … but that’s a different beast to tackle on a different day.

My big boss, the guy who’s my boss’ boss, held a meeting this week to talk to the reporters about the changes that will soon be taking place.

There were two meetings held and, as it happened, I went to the second one. The buzz around the office before the meeting started was not good.

No one was happy, none of his answers were good enough and, for some unknown reason, he didn’t like being probed by eight different reports … Curious.

The meeting started and I was cynical, to say the least. But the more he talked the better and better it was sounding.

Our website is changing. The newsroom’s baby is changing.

It’s a hard concept to understand.

What was and will be the most challenging part of this is that we will no longer be basing our judgment on stories and our success online by the number of page views we get. We were told page views are moot and of no importance any longer.

Huh?

Since I got here, the only way we’ve done anything with our website was by looking at the number of page views we generate. Heck, we had a pizza party when we got to 8 million.

Now, who knows. I was told that’s not my job to worry about.

I was told that what my big boss wants is quality content. Quality content? Who ever heard of such a thing.

New features will be in the paper, including an Outdoor section, which will allow us (yeah, me too!) to go out and write about the things locals and visitors can do in the area.

We can go out and take our time on a story. We can do a good job and not put up anything and everything.

I know this is all talk, but my hope is that some of it will come to fruition.

The truth of the matter is, most likely, nothing will change. I will still have the same workload, but more could be piled on because of the new story expectations.

I hate being cynical, I really do. It’s just an unrealistic thought that I won’t have to do the monotonous work that takes up most of my day to replace it with one story only.